How hard is it to kill someone? Geez. This is not a rhetorical question. Our government can kill people in foreign countries without ever setting foot there with drones. Terrorists and gang members knock off innocent civilians all day long in some areas. Heck, poor choices in mixing pills seem to dispatch a number of celebs by accident. Yet with our prisons, the use of the death penalty is now in a more precarious position because apparently the executioners can’t get it right. In Arizona last week, a condemned man spent almost two hours on a gurney waiting to die after being given a state-ordered lethal injection. Prison officials said he slept peacefully after the first drugs sedated him, but the drugs to stop his life still took as long as some movies. If Jack the Ripper or the Son of Sam had worked at this pace, they would have grown old without attaining serial killer status. The prolonged job in Arizona was preceded by an absolute mess in Oklahoma this spring when an inmate was given the lethal injection and didn’t die peacefully. In fact, the events looked so gruesome prison officials were attempting to call the whole thing off when the man succumbed to a heart attack. A third execution in Ohio, also this year, was similar in the lack of effective drugs with prolonged laying on a gurney. The majority of Americans favor the death penalty, according to polls, but the inability to efficiently carry out the orders without creating scenes of cruel and unusual suffering is crucial. America can’t have poorly-handled executions giving more ammunition for those already seeking to abolish capital punishment. If we are going to continue with the death penalty as an option in our justice system, we need a system of carrying it out that works reasonably well. It should be noted that even in the modern era some states have authorized alternative methods of execution - 8 states authorized electrocution; 3 states lethal gas; 3 states hanging; and 2 states firing squad, according to the Department of Justice website. Maybe it is time to return to one of the other forms. The French still used their antiquated but effective guillotine until 1977 when they abolished the death penalty. The many people who argue that those condemned to death certainly didn’t give this amount of consideration to their victims are correct. In an eye-for-eye scenario, there is a lot of leeway. But in a practical American justice system, that argument doesn’t hold water – regardless of personal opinions. In California, one state court case already questions whether making someone sit for decades on death row with an uncertain execution date constitutes unusual punishment – just because of the decades of uncertainty. It is certain that anyone sentenced to death has a good chance of succumbing to natural causes before the sentence is carried out. The 43 inmates executed in America during 2012 had an average time on death row of 15 years and 10 months and this average had actually dropped quite a bit from those executed in 2011 – who had been there a longer time on average. With the longer stays, the number of inmates on death row continues to grow, reaching a total of more than 3,030 people sitting in federal and state prisons sentenced to die based on the latest figures at the Department of Justice website. It should be noted that not all states have a death penalty and, of those sitting on death rows, more than half the total number come from just four states (California with 712 has by far the largest population; Florida, Texas and Pennsylvania are the next three). Georgia has a middle of the road figure of 95 in the latest figures, released by the Department of Justice on their website which has totals from Dec. 31, 2012. As the old adage says if you are going to do something, do it correctly. This is particularly important with the death penalty; if it can’t be done right, legal challenges are going to take the choice away.